Last Tuesday at 2:17 PM, I experienced a moment of clarity so profound it bordered on the spiritual. Sitting in my home office, twenty-seven minutes into a forty-five-minute virtual meeting about quarterly social media metrics, I realized that everything—absolutely everything—being discussed could have been communicated in a four-sentence email. The epiphany arrived as the seventh participant unmuted to “just add one quick thing” that was neither quick nor additive, and I found myself staring at my own reflection in the video window, watching my soul visibly depart from my body.
This wasn’t an isolated incident. By my conservative estimate, I’ve spent approximately 11,400 hours of my professional life in meetings that could have been emails. That’s 475 days—more than a year of my limited human existence—watching loading circles as someone attempts to share their screen, hearing people announce that they were “having audio issues,” and listening to colleagues read aloud the exact PowerPoint slides I was simultaneously looking at. If there’s a hell specifically designed for knowledge workers, surely this is it.
The irony isn’t lost on me. During my years at [redacted major tech company], I helped design communication platforms intended to free us from unnecessary meetings. We created asynchronous tools promising workplace liberation—ways to collaborate without requiring simultaneous presence. We built shared documents, commenting systems, and messaging platforms specifically engineered to reduce meeting dependency. Our marketing materials literally featured slogans about “taking back your calendar” and “communication freedom.”
Yet somehow, despite these technological advances, meeting culture hasn’t diminished—it’s metastasized. The average knowledge worker now spends 21.5 hours weekly in meetings, a 30% increase over the past decade. Remote work, far from reducing this burden, has somehow made it worse. Without the natural constraints of limited physical conference rooms and human travel time between them, our calendars have become perfect geometric grids of back-to-back rectangles, each representing another chunk of life sacrificed to the meeting gods.
The taxonomy of unnecessary meetings is both extensive and predictable. There’s the “status update” meeting, where people sequentially report information that could have been typed in approximately one-fifth the time it takes to speak it. The “brainstorming” session where three vocal participants generate ideas while everyone else mentally composes their grocery lists. The “team building” exercise that builds nothing but collective resentment. And my personal favorite, the “quick sync” that is neither quick nor synchronizing, but somehow becomes a regular calendar fixture until retirement or sweet death releases you from its clutches.
Consider the economic absurdity of this arrangement. A meeting with eight people earning an average of $50 per hour costs the organization $400 for every sixty minutes. Multiply this by the thousands of unnecessary meetings occurring daily in a mid-sized company, and you’re looking at millions of dollars annually spent on activities that could be replaced by well-written paragraphs. It’s as if we’ve collectively agreed to set enormous piles of money on fire while everyone watches via webcam, occasionally nodding thoughtfully as the flames consume our operational budgets.
The psychological toll extends beyond simple time wastage. There’s the particular cognitive dissonance of recognizing a meeting’s pointlessness within the first three minutes yet remaining captive for the scheduled duration. The distinct anxiety of watching the clock as a meandering discussion threatens to invade the slim fifteen-minute buffer before your next call. The special dread of receiving a meeting invitation with no agenda, no stated purpose, and the cryptic description “touching base” from someone three organizational levels above you.
Most disturbing is how we’ve normalized these experiences as inevitable features of professional life rather than treating them as the organizational pathologies they are. “How’s your day looking?” has become synonymous with “How severely has your calendar been colonized by meetings?” The typical response—”Back-to-back until 5″—is delivered with a mixture of complaint and perverse pride, as though calendar density has become a proxy for importance. We lament our meeting overload while simultaneously judging unscheduled time as suspiciously unproductive.
I’ve been collecting colleagues’ meeting horror stories, partly for this article and partly as a form of group therapy. Sarah in marketing described a standing weekly meeting that continued for three months after the project it was created for had been completed—nobody took the initiative to cancel it, so it zombied onward, consuming brain matter every Wednesday at 10 AM. Dev from engineering admitted to building a small script that periodically moves his mouse and taps his keyboard during particularly pointless meetings to maintain the appearance of engagement while he does actual productive work on another device. Tanya from legal confessed to scheduling fake meetings with herself as defensive calendar blocks—her digital equivalent of those inflatable driver decoys used to deter carjackers.
The pandemic-driven shift to remote work created the perfect conditions for meeting proliferation. Without physical proximity providing natural moments for quick questions or casual updates, we defaulted to scheduling formal video gatherings for interactions that once occurred organically. The psychological need for connection during isolation further accelerated this trend, as did the subtle fear that without visible presence in meetings, remote workers might be overlooked for opportunities or promotions.
Most insidious was how video meetings created the illusion of productivity without its substance. Calendar density became a visible metric of busyness, while actual output remained harder to measure. Managers uncomfortable with not physically seeing their reports compensated by scheduling check-ins, sync-ups, and touch-bases until their teams had no time left to perform the work they were ostensibly checking in on. The result: days filled with discussions about work with precious little time to actually perform it.
The technological solutions exist. I know because I helped build some of them. Asynchronous communication tools, collaborative documents, project management platforms—all designed to reduce meeting dependency. Yet they remain chronically underutilized while our calendars grow increasingly congested. The obstacle isn’t technological but cultural and psychological—an organizational addiction to synchronous communication that persists despite overwhelming evidence of its inefficiency.
This addiction has identifiable enablers. There’s the meeting scheduler who finds it easier to book a gathering than craft a clear written communication. The meeting enthusiast who genuinely believes real-time discussion is always superior to asynchronous alternatives (spoiler: it’s not). The meeting hostage who lacks the organizational authority to decline invitations. And perhaps most problematically, the meeting martyr who wears calendar density as a badge of importance, subtly signaling that unscheduled time indicates insufficient workplace value.
I’ve played each of these roles at various points in my career. I’ve sent the lazy meeting invitation when crafting a clear email seemed too effortful. I’ve nodded sympathetically about calendar congestion while simultaneously filling colleagues’ schedules with my own unnecessary gatherings. I’ve silently resented meeting invitations while lacking the workplace courage to decline them, perpetuating the very culture I complained about during happy hours.
My personal breaking point arrived during a ninety-minute video call regarding minor updates to an internal document template. As the discussion entered its second hour, I realized I was trapped in a meeting about formatting that could have been resolved through a simple shared document with commenting functionality—exactly the type of tool I’d helped design to prevent such meetings. The absurdity was so complete it transcended frustration and entered the realm of workplace existentialism.
Since that epiphany, I’ve been practicing small acts of meeting resistance. I decline invitations that lack clear agendas. I suggest asynchronous alternatives when appropriate. I’ve become the person who asks “What specific outcome are we seeking from this gathering?” when meetings drift into purposelessness. These micro-rebellions haven’t transformed organizational culture, but they’ve gradually reclaimed portions of my calendar for actual productive work.
More radical approaches exist for those with sufficient workplace capital to implement them. Some progressive organizations have instituted meeting-free days—complete calendar blocks where synchronous gatherings are prohibited to enable focused work. Others have implemented “meeting budgets,” treating scheduled time as a finite resource requiring explicit justification. One particularly bold startup introduced a policy where any meeting participant could declare “This meeting could have been an email” if they deemed the gathering unnecessary—immediately ending the session and requiring the organizer to send written follow-up instead.
These innovations remain exceptions rather than norms. The average knowledge worker continues spending nearly half their productive hours in meetings of questionable value—watching colleagues struggle with screen sharing, hearing pets bark in backgrounds, and mentally composing responses to emails they could be addressing if not trapped in video rectangles discussing matters that rarely require real-time interaction.
The true tragedy isn’t just time wasted but potential squandered. Every unnecessary meeting represents not only hours lost but the opportunity cost of what might have been accomplished in those hours—the code unwritten, the analyses uncompleted, the creative solutions undeveloped because our collective attention was occupied discussing things that could have been communicated in a few well-crafted sentences.
So the next time your soul begins departing your body twenty minutes into a purposeless status update, remember you’re experiencing a shared affliction of modern work life—one that persists not because we lack technological alternatives but because we haven’t mustered the organizational courage to embrace them. The path to calendar liberation begins with a simple, revolutionary question before scheduling any gathering: “Could this meeting be an email?” If the answer is yes, perhaps the most productive thing you can do is close your calendar and open your word processor instead.
Until then, I’ll see you on the video call that could have been a four-sentence email. I’ll be the one with the suspiciously frozen video feed, quietly doing actual work while nodding at strategically timed intervals.
